Cons of writing paid reviews

Many times the advertisers purchase reviews not for the quality or face value of the review but for those two or three following links (i.e. links without rel=nofollow) that originate out of the review post and point to their services. However, this is not something that Google likes because paying for do-follow links is an attempt to sabotage its page ranking algorithm in Google’s eyes. In principle, Google hates those blogs or websites that trade the page rank via products like sponsored reviews, text link ads etc and tend to downgrade them in terms of PR (Page Rank). This is the main disadvantage of writing paid reviews.

How to deal with the above problem?

The above problem cannot be tackled completely within the context of a single (or your main) blog. Hence it’s a good idea to do your paid review activities on another blog or a paid review blog. This dedicated blog will be basically getting its page rank boost from your main blog and other links via link building activities and will have 25% or 30% of its content as paid reviews.

How to establish the paid reviews blog?

The following are my thoughts on how to establish and tap your dedicated paid reviews blog:

The dedicated blog for paid reviews should be in the niches that has good potential for paid reviews (e.g. Finance, debt management, credit cards etc)

The typical life time of such a blog could be 12 to 18 months (or until Google stops indexing and ranking it)

The first two-three months should be dedicated to link building (even paid links by spending $25 or $30 dollars a month)

Typically Google updates Toolbar PR every three or four months and following each update, you can go for as many paid reviews as possible while you should go slow when PR update is nearing

One should be able to make 250 or 300 dollars a month easily as against the expenses of $25 or $30 (for link building) using of of the paid review sites such as sponsored reviews

You should write no more than one paid review per every three or four unpaid posts to avoid any immediate blacklisting

Maintaining more than one paid review blog should bring decent online income; there’s further potential of using text-link-ads

Comments

Wow! What a great idea. This would have never occurred to me. So, the blog would only last 12-18 months? And then a new one would need to be started? Do you think this would work? Or have you already tried it?

I did not get it. How can the SE’s differentiate between paid and unpaid reviews unless we specifically label it as such? Paid links are picked by Google since some blogs usually label it as sponsor ads or advertise here. A lot of links in every post will definitely signal a potential link farm but I don’t think Google is smart enough just to recognize a paid post with a unpaid one just by looking at it (with no possible indication….)

By the way, second paragraph has a typo. Advertisers purchase reviews for do-follow links and not for no-follow links…

Lots of top bloggers do paid reviews, and clearly states the fact when doing so. They seem to get away with it. What does this mean? Favouritism being exhibited towards the bigger players? Pray elaborate.

John Chow was the man who was digesting heavy meals of paid posts and he still do it and Big Google wipe his site from their index like Javel++

Other bloggers do it and say it loudly that they are doing it and yet google does not say anything.

“Justice a deux vitesse” – translated to english it mean Two ways justice!

Now google say that what they dont like is the do-follow links in these paid post. I think there is a way google can detect that a post is paid. Assume there is a blog about which is used to write on certain topics and suddenly one day he write about a totally weird topic that does not goes along with his regular topics. This is a point google can use.

Now another…a sponsored post usually have 2 to 3 links which are do-follow and links to 3 different pages of the same site. This is a possible way to detect sponsored post. Because normally a normal blog post example if writting about coffee, it should contain links to one or 2 different sites too and not only as if promoting a site different page. An argument is that yea a blogger can be doing it without getting paid but then… got to reason with google lol.

Some tricks that some bloggers are using are as follow with sponsored posts:

1. They use the do-follow links of the concerned advertiser but also includes links to other websites such as wikipedia, yahoo answers and other small blogs… making it appear like a real article.

2. They either say it is a paid post and use no-follow.

Another trick is that they often use do-follow and after 2 weeks (apprx) the modify the post and nofollow the links..which can be against the TOS of the paid post company.

Disclaimer: I dont do paid post lol. But if i were a google detector man these would be the way i will try to detect possible paid posts.

The trick is not to name the blog as a review blog post or even mention review in the url. You dont post sponsored reviews everytime, you also blog in between making it normal and you dont mentioned anything to do with sponsored reviews….Financial companies pay close to USD 100 per post if you have high PR and high alexa ranking…Yan has started a separate blog on sponsored posts , I think is called sponsoreview.com

amazing article and even better discussion. now I know what all those “pro-bloggers” do sitting at home 24×7. Once you get the trick to trick Google, it is some easy money out there. Keep one primary blog which everyone know and few other secondary blogs for paid reviews, text links and so on. Cool!!

@ZK, Exactly… and Yan seem to be having the same idea as I mentioned here. I had taken a look at his new review blog sometime ago. It’s cool and converting as well, I guess.

@Raju, Yep, one wouldn’t want to risk the main blog ban by Google, and this secondary blog is so cheap to maintain. Nobody cares if it has less traffic as long as homepage PR is good. And if there’s good traffic, the referral links also will mint money.

About this Blog & Blogger

I am Ajith Edassery, an Internet Marketer from Bangalore. I quit my High-paid job in the Software Industry to pursue Blogging, Internet Marketing and other Home-based money making opportunities. Read more...